Jim Tully is a misfit who belongs to an earlier era. The causes he believes in, like the world he wants to live in, are already doomed. The narrator first meets him during a student riot in Paris and finds him again more than twenty years later in Thailand. In between Tully has drifted around the world, tossed from one noble cause to another, even being imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge. In Bangkok, writing a book his friends fear reveals too many secrets, he is persuaded to work for an American movie mogul. To Tully's disgust his screenplay about a new Genesis is cut and manipulated into a nature romp in the jungle. When a sequel called Genocide is planned, Tully quits. Soon after, the tycoon is found murdered. Tully vanishes, only to become involved in the search in Cambodia for MiAs - American prisoners of war who have been missing since the end of the Vietnam war. When this venture is exposed as a scam, Tully retreats into the jungle, subsequently finding a new cause helping the Karen in their fight for independence from the tyrannical Burmese government. He finally reappears in Bangkok during the bloody democracy riots in 1992, only to be among the many listed as missing. In fact he has returned to Cambodia, where the United Nations peacekeeping mission assign him to an outpost far up the Mekong River and to an uncertain welcome from his old adversaries - the Khmer Rouge.


"You must maroon me as soon as ever you can get amongst these islands off the Cambodge shore,” he went on.
"Maroon you! We are not living in a boy's adventure tale," I protested.


Joseph Conrad—"The Secret Sharer"